2017 Little Easy Bean Network – Everything Beans, Post It Here & Join The Fun

[flowerbug]

A question, when buying dry beans packaged for culinary use do you think they have been treated so they won't germinate. I've had trouble germinating these, out of a possible 20 only getting 3 to germinate. Just wondering.

Annette

my guess is harsh storage/processing conditions and perhaps even age...

i don't think so as it would have to pass FDA regulations as a food additive and for safety (not that i think these things are impossible to get through as i do read package labels, but still it would be an added expense and i don't think the bulk food business is a high margin one...)...

when i started growing bulk beans from a soup bean mix in 2011 i had germination issues from only a few of the beans and they were the chickpeas and the lentils. the rest all came through and i had an amazing crop (for the price of a few $ - note that it is always bad to win as a gambler the first time out )...

this pic is of the garden where most of them were planted that year, kinda chaotic/messy as i was redoing the edge and trying to remove the horsetail at the same time:

i took pictures of the results of that planting too, but haven't edited and posted a pic of that on-line, it was between 5 and 10lbs of seeds not counting what i sampled fresh (hard for me to resist any fresh bean in the garden).

 

[Blue-Jay]

@aftermidnight,

I had read back in the 1980's that some companies heat treat dry beans after they are harvested to kill possible weevils that the beans may contain under the seed coat. That would explain germination issues with bulk packaged beans. I think Rancho Gordo in California beans will grow as well as Purcell Mountain. I bought some beans from a northern Wisconsin grower whos bulk packed beans are good to grow also. Can't remember the name.

I would think that if a grower definitely knows the area where the beans are grown from past experience then they will or will not heat treat their crop. The best thing for them to do would be to freeze them for several days, but that takes time and could involve more expense than heat treating them.

 

[HmooseK]

@aftermidnight

I told George & Harry about us. I hope they stop in! Harry has 3 of Nuna beans planted in his greenhouse and is having good luck with them.

 

[Blue-Jay]

@HmooseK, I think the Nuna beans are daylight sensitive. Will only bloom when the daylight is 12 hours. Has Harry grown seed successfully with them before? I have about three varieties of beans that are very pretty and neat looking that Joseph Simcox gave to me. I don't know if they are too old to still germinate. I would love to give them to someone who can successfully grow seed of daylight sensitive beans. Would be fun to get some new seed back of them just to look at a little bunch of them. When I get back home in April will take some photos of the seed and post them on the 2018 thread.

When growing daylight sensitive beans the light must be strictly cut off at about the 12 hour mark, and they must not be allowed to get even a hint of light or they won't bloom. Some people who grow them make some kind of cover to put over the vines.

 

[HmooseK]

@Bluejay77

Harry lives a few hours from me. I've never met him, but He, Annette, George and myself have been talking and trading Beans for a decade. He is 90 yo and doesn't garden as much as he used to, but I can tell he is excited about them. He just ordered them this year, so this is his first year growing them. He ordered a pound from Peru, I think.

I'm sure he will appreciate any information, so I will pass it along to him.

In fact, I sent him a link and I hope he joins us.

 

[aftermidnight]

@Bluejay, I sent Harry the Nuna bean seed, a few were given to me by a GW member and I grew them in 2016. I believe the seed I was given were from a commercial variety, I don't know for sure but probably bought in the U.S.


This is why I asked if beans sold for culinary use have been treated so they won't germinate.

In 2016 I managed to get 3 to germinate out of the handful of seeds I had. I grew these 3 plants in a tub, they turned out to be a true bush bean. When they popped (pun intended) through the soil around May 18th they looked a little peaked.

but I persevered with them and by June 24th they looked like this.


The copper mesh is to keep the %$#&% slugs out. My garden has a name "Dancin' with Weeds", I even have a sign on the gate but I'm seriously thinking of renaming my garden "Slug Heaven".
I didn’t keep a record of when they started flowering but by September 12th the pods were good and dry so I started picking them.

So happily, this one is not day length sensitive. I haven't tried popping any but if things go well for me I have enough left to grow again this year. Hopefully there will be enough dry seed to try popping a few. I googled and it looks like there are a couple of places in the states selling Nuna popping beans maybe the same as this one or maybe a different one.

I've mentioned before that I grew some pole bean seed from Ecuador, just as an experiment to see if they would grow here, they did and I harvested dry seed from most of them in September but one or two of them were day length sensitive and I didn't get seed until November and only then because that year we had a long warm fall.

I've given most of these away as I won't be growing them again, I do have a few left stored in the freezer but I don't know which jar I put them in, I started out with good intentions, had the lot of them in their own numbered jar until I gave most away, so dumb me I put them in a jar with something else and forgot to record which one.
If I ever come across them I have promised the ones with the green seed coats to someone on this forum, these if I remember correctly were one of the late ones.

Annette

 

[HmooseK]

@aftermidnight
@Bluejay77

Harry also bought a pound from a place called Chili Smith Family Foods. I have no clue if they are daylight sensitive or not.

https://chilismith.com/products/nuna-the-popping-bean

I know next to nothing about these beans except what little I learned from Harry and Annette.

 

[HmooseK]

@flowerbug

Hi! I have a question. I visited your site and noticed you have a bean named Red and White. May I ask about this bean? Anything you can tell me about it would be helpful. The reason I ask is because I just bought a Red and White bean off eBay and the fellow couldn't tell me much about it other than he attained it from a trade and it supposedly came from a small shop in Turkey.

I bought it because it looked similar to the bean in my avatar. The bean in my avatar is a bean I've known the last decade as Hoteko although the lady I originally got it from now calls it Osterreich.

Anyway, after buying the red and white bean and putting it up next to Hoteko, I was able to see they were different.

Hoteko

 

[Pulsegleaner]

my guess is harsh storage/processing conditions and perhaps even age...

i don't think so as it would have to pass FDA regulations as a food additive and for safety (not that i think these things are impossible to get through as i do read package labels, but still it would be an added expense and i don't think the bulk food business is a high margin one...)...

when i started growing bulk beans from a soup bean mix in 2011 i had germination issues from only a few of the beans and they were the chickpeas and the lentils. the rest all came through and i had an amazing crop (for the price of a few $ - note that it is always bad to win as a gambler the first time out )...

It sort of varies from product to product. I got my Owl's Eye cowpeas from a Korean bean soup mix. It's a little hard to tell how the germination actually is (the critters eat so many I only get a few anyway) But I have noticed that the processing does make the cowpeas very brittle (or maybe they are like that naturally) so that a lot of the seed is broken or compromised. I'm actually still sorting out the bad stuff in my most recent batch (the company stopped using that kind of cowpea in their mix, but every now and again a box of old bags makes it through to the stores).

Funny, I've never had a problem growing bulk chickpeas, they seem some of the hardiest seeds I know. Maybe its the type (until last year, everything I was growing was desi type (grinding chickpeas). And lentils grow as well as vetch (and almost as weedily)

I also remember years ago finding some bags of Chicheuna (edible grasspea) that were so mangled I needed all the bags they had just to get a decent number of intact seeds (they were probably just too big for the processing equipment).

 

[flowerbug]

@HmooseK

hi, the beans i have called Red & White are a local cross from my gardens. i tried to give them a very generic name because i have no idea of their habit or stability yet. i won't give any more formal names to my crosses until i know them better. sorry, i wish i knew more about either of the beans you mention as they are quite beautiful and i like the round shapes. to me they look like derivations of the yin yang or calypso beans.

without some kind of genetic tracking i'm not sure i can always identify the parents of crosses here. i grow a lot of red beans but i don't usually grow a lot of white beans, mostly yellow eye beans. the beans i am most likely have that kind of white pattern on the end is the appaloosa or the painted pony, but the shape is different for each of those and the colors entirely wrong for the painted pony.

@Pulsegleaner the few chickpeas i tried to grow were shelled in a mix and only a few. i never saw them sprout. around here chipmunks tend to find anything interesting when it is planted. in the case of the lentils, those did sprout but they didn't produce anything at all. i don't even think they flowered. they could have been over-crowded from the surrounding plantings.

in contrast, i got a wonderful soup pea from that same mix. the peas are pretty good when shelled young too. what is nice about them is that they are almost entirely tendrils when growing so they look like fuzzy plants with just a few leaves. the peas are green and mostly smooth and round. i like how the tendrils make the plants support each other when grown without support of any kind when planted in a block...